Reading with purpose?

I have just finished reading ‘I object’ [Thames & Hudson] a book described as ‘Ian Hislop’s search for dissent’ to accompany the exhibition of the same name in the British Museum curated by him.

I read it as a guilty pleasure because it appeals and pampers the inner-dilettante in me.  It is a ‘lazy’ book with gobbets of easily digested information on a bewilderingly wide range of well-illustrated objects with Ian Hislop’s comments in speech bubbles scattered throughout the text.  A text, I assume was written by Ian Hislop’s co-author Tom Hockenhull.

I would describe it as a relatively small format right-on coffee table book, something to dip into rather than read through in the way that I did.  There are attempts in the book to pull together the disparate objects and the selection is divided into three rough sections, but there is no real over-arching theme or premise other than the concept of ‘Protest’ to link them all and to give them direction.

Having said that, the selection is good fun, and it does allow a sort of narrative that uses a whole range of odd objects to make points, and it also gives some objects an airing that they don’t perhaps deserve, but they are certainly worth considering in the context that has been created.

I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I delighted in the variety of objects from dishes to doors, from clogs to cartoons, from statues to stamps and from the unexpected illumination that such diversity gives.  It has the eclecticism that an institution after my own heart, The Open University, would appreciate – and it also has academic footnotes, a bibliography, a full list of illustrations’ details and an index to make the book academic enough to read with an easy conscience as a graduate of said institution!

What the book also does is encourage thought about a whole range of approaches that would take this exhibition further: a range of graffiti, but not the Banksy type, the scrawled, the hasty the amateur, the ad hoc; barricades considered as installations; hand lettered posters and placards, with letters that don’t fit, unplanned, raw; images of destruction, the smashing of windows, the throwing of paint; defacing posters, coins, adverts, road signs – there are ideas aplenty to develop!

And, true to what I’ve written I have thought of making an object of my own as my response to reading the book.  It will take a small purchase on-line and the re-use of something I have had since I was a child and a shop in town, but I think it will work. 

This is something that I will post when it is complete!  And perhaps I’ll send a copy of it to Ian Hislop and Tom Hocknhull as a sort of thank-you for producing this stimulating experience!